Alone III: The Pinkerton Years

Geffen;
2011

Find it at:

You'd think Alone III: The Pinkerton Years would work like Rivers Cuomo's past installments of vault clearance: In exchange for being offered these very #rare and #based freestyles, you, Weezer Superfan, will not do something so petty as to question the need for their release. Ah, but note the subtitle: "The Pinkerton Years." It's a powerful but potentially dangerous sales pitch. Alone III comes sidelong with The Pinkerton Diaries, a $75 (and thus collectors-only) volume that compiles Cuomo's "journals, emails, letters, photos, and school papers" from the Pinkerton era and offers "an intimate look into the writing and recordings of Rivers Cuomo from 1994-1997." Which threatens not only redundancy but a complete undermining of Pinkerton's integrity. "I thought Pinkerton was Cuomo's diary," you might be thinking. "He was holding back on us? Editing?" Does this compromise the perceived purity of such a powerful record?

Then again, Pinkerton has always been accompanied by a healthy serving of half-truths, tall tales, and revisionist history. But you can see why so many want to give it a protected status: Cuomo was far more embarrassed by its Billboard failure than anything he actually said on Pinkerton, and his output since then has been the work of someone with severe commercial abandonment issues. But Alone III doesn't feel like a cash-in like the Pinkerton reissue or 2010's Memories Tour, in which the band (minus bassist Matt Sharp) played their first two albums in full. No, this is something else entirely. With its whiplash sequencing (26 tracks in far less than an hour), low production values, minute-long asides, and pause-record tape overdubs, Alone III seems to ask: What would've happened if Rivers Cuomo had wanted to be Robert Pollard or Lou Barlow for the rest of the 90s?

So if you value these archaeological digs as an opportunity to construct an alternate band history, Alone III is easily Cuomo's most worthwhile project since, well, Pinkerton. But what's truly surprising is that it satisfies in actuality as much as it does in theory, and not just because it puts a bunch of Pinkerton songs in the mix. Alone III actually deconstructs that record by spreading out into three sections, providing anchors for Cuomo's mini-suite ambitions rather than the lead-up to Pinkerton's autobiographical payoff ("Across the Sea", "The Good Life"). Fully formed but raw-as-hell versions of "Getchoo" and "Tired of Sex" mesh easily with Cuomo's off-the-cuff material and allow Alone III to exist in its own orbit as a no-fi, freewheeling, and ultimately fun record that either Geffen or Weezer wouldn't allow themselves to ever release in the midst of the record industry's then-booming economy.

Even with the impression that Cuomo is dipping into his private stock, a lot of this will be familiar to non-diehards, like the two-minute surge of "You Gave Your Love to Me Softly" that leans to the latter side of "pop-punk" and could've replaced "Why Bother?" on Pinkerton with a 180-degree attitude change. And it's tough to imagine Weezer ever pulling off something like "Lisa". Its blues-bend Kiss riffs would've been employed too smirkingly, its charming chorus harmonies polished to anonymity, and its lyric about a workplace crush ("I wish I didn't work for you/ All we ever seem to do is business/ Read and sign and fax this") extended beyond its means into dad-humor.

So those are the reasons why III is the most like an actual Weezer album of any of the Alone records, and the least like a Cuomo yard sale. But the real pleasure is in how Alone III casts the creative up-ramp to Pinkerton as an inspired if not always productive time for Cuomo-- you can practically visualize his brain giddily whirring with a flood of new ideas and classicist ambitions. Sure, there are 50-second sketches that have limited replay value outside of Alone III, but they keep the end-to-end listen brisk and pleasurable. Elsewhere, some songs are so self-explanatory and complete that they don't need much elaboration ("I'm So Lonely on a Saturday Night"), others crash into a dead end ("Oh God, I'm Hungry", "The End of My String"), and of course, some are just flat out unlistenable ("What Is This I Find?").

In a Spin interview leading up to Pinkerton's re-release, Cuomo expressed why he enjoyed going back to these tapes even though he's far more excited by his new material, saying "I was really touched by the emotion in my voice… there's so much sensitivity and pain." Alone III's last track would seem to reiterate that: On "One Glorious Moment", Cuomo gives a post-operation captain's log, confiding to a tape recorder, "I actually peed for the first time on my own… it was a glorious moment. I'm going to try to set up some music to listen to, goodbye." That candor can be seen as being every bit as self-obsessed and pandering as Hurleyor Death to False Metal, but that last line sticks out. Alone III is a bracing, imperfect reminder of a time when music was something Cuomo just couldn't live without.